One million downloads, one million thanks

By Jesus Manuel Olivas ● Head of Products | July 18th, 2017

It feels great to build a Drupal tool that has achieved more than 1 million downloads and helps people from different places around the world to create, build and deploy Drupal applications. It's been quite a journey, which took almost four years and required a lot of time and effort. It’s only fitting that I walk you through my Drupal Console journey.

I hope that taking you through my experience working on the Drupal Console will motivate you become part of a project, collaborate or take the first step. So here are the most important milestones.

The Beginning: The commit that started all

After been organizing a few hangouts and trying to decide to start a contributed project related to Drupal 8, David Flores pushed the first commit to the project repo. It was just a README.md file but every journey, even those that impact many people, start with one single step. That file marked the beginning of Drupal Console.

The Turning Point: Larry Garfield Light Bulb Moment

Everything made more sense at Drupal Camp Costa Rica during a conversation between Larry Garfield, David Flores and I. While talking about Drupal 8 and the recent introduction of Symfony Components, Larry casually mentioned that someone should bring the Symfony console to Drupal 8. That was the light bulb moment!. David and I had been discussing the same topic but had not been writing any code, until that day ... we decided to actually start working on the project.

The Prototype: Drupal Console Receives Warm Welcome

After two months of work and only four commands, we had the chance to present a prototype of the project at BADCamp, during a DrupalizeMe training.

The Demo at the training went so well that we got asked to do the same demo at another session about Drupal 8 module development the next day. This was the moment we realized the project we were trying to build was filling a gap related to writing Drupal 8 modules. Drupal Console started as a scaffolding code generator and that is probably the feature that shines the most because it saves you hours of time trying to figure the code you need to write. But the project evolved into a full CLI with the help of multiple contributors.

The Benefits: Drupal Console Can… Open Doors?

After presenting at NYCCamp I had the chance to talk with Ray Saltini and John DeSalvo from Blink Reaction (now FFW). At that time the Company was looking for a Symfony and Drupal 8 developer to help them train company developers and work on contributing back to the Drupal project. One month later I was hired to work contributing to the Drupal Console project.

Preaching Console: Speaking At Events

The project also led to opportunities to meet thousands of drupalers. Teaching people the benefits and the “how to’s” has become part of the passion. I love hearing how people use the console and how we can make it better.

I have been fortunate enough to spread the word about DrupalConsole by speaking at several DrupalCamp and DrupalCon events at Bogota, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Dublin, and Baltimore. I love teaching people how to use the Drupal Console and if you are interested in having me talking at your event just ping me.

Changing Lives: Drupal Console Creates A New Company

After almost four years working together at the DrupalConsole project and five years of knowing each other. Eduardo Garcia aka enzo pitched me the idea of joining forces with him and Kenny Abarca to rebrand and revamp Anexus IT (one of the most well known development companies in Latin America) and this is how weKnow was born.

I’m glad to share the most recent update on weKnow, we just brought in Omar Aguirre, another Drupal Console co-maintainer, to our team.

Thank you for being an awesome community

None of this could have been possible without the incredible support of the community. It’s amazing how a project we started a few years ago as a Drupal 8 learning exercise, is now considered for the Drupal community a must-have tool to accelerate Drupal 8 development.

Thank you for the first one million downloads, for using the project event with all of the constant changes, for attending talks at events, for providing feedback, creating issues, and sending pull requests, for spreading the word and love about the project sending a tweet, writing a blog post or recording a video, and very special thanks to all of the awesome contributors (you can see them listed here).